Elastic gloves made from natural latex polymers or from synthetic polymers are used in numerous applications. Such gloves, for instance, are used by medical personnel during examinations, surgeries and the like. Elastic gloves are also used during food preparation and in clean room environments. The gloves are used to protect the hands of a wearer and/or to prevent contamination.
The elastic gloves can be made from numerous materials. For instance, as described above, in one embodiment, the gloves are made from natural latex polymers. Synthetic polymers that are used to make elastic gloves include polyvinyl chloride, nitrile polymers, block copolymers such as styrene-ethylene butylene-styrene block copolymers, and the like.
Elastic gloves are commonly packaged together in dispensers that are intended to dispense the gloves one at a time. Such dispensers are very useful especially in environments where new gloves are constantly needed. For instance, physicians or nurses performing medical examinations and tests are constantly discarding old gloves and donning new gloves as they see new patients.
Problems have been experienced in the past, however, in designing dispensers that efficiently dispense gloves one at a time. Currently, gloves are packaged and stacked together in a dispenser such that the fingers of one glove are placed on top of the fingers of another glove and then folded in half to overlap one another. This arrangement allows for dispensing of the gloves cuff first by pulling the cuff of the leading glove in the stack in a motion perpendicular to the fold. Dispensing of the gloves, for instance, is typically achieved by a downward motion. The above configuration, however, has various limitations. For instance, due to the amount of overlap between the gloves, pulling one glove has a tendency to also pull an adjacent glove through the dispenser. If the second glove is not needed, users typically “stuff” the extra glove back into the dispenser creating further problems downstream.
Another problem with the above configuration is that the gloves can only be removed from the dispenser in a direction perpendicular to the fold which translates into either removing gloves only from the top or bottom of the dispenser.